A Super Bowl for the super-rich: San Francisco’s homeless are being “herded like cattle” ahead of the big game

www.salon.com|Evelyn Nieves

The first official signs of Super Bowl 50—six-foot-tall, 1,600-pound, solar-powered number 50s, each with its own Super Bowl-themed design—started popping up at photogenic landmarks around San Francisco two weeks ago.

The first unofficial signs—rows of tents and tarps lining a major thoroughfare under the I-80 freeway to the Bay Bridge—started popping up two months ago.

That’s when Oscar McKinney, a 49-year-old hearse driver, pitched a tent on the sidewalk across from a Best Buy parking lot. McKinney moved there after being ousted from an encampment near the downtown staging area for Super Bowl City.

The single ugliest myth the rich perpetuate about the poor

www.salon.com|Paul Buchheit

Many wealthy white conservative males believe they deserve their good fortunes, and that the poor are taking handouts. But on average little of the money of the wealthiest Americans is spent on productive job-creating ventures. Potential young entrepreneurs, in contrast, are too often mired in debt and deprived of opportunities to prosper.

Based on the evidence, the very people demeaned by the rich as ‘lazy’ are generally the hardest workers.

www.salon.com

Governor Sam Brownback and his supporters in the state legislature of Kansas have turned their state into dystopian inspiration for a post-apocalyptic thriller, slashing social services, and leaving the poor to suffer — and in many cases actually die — for lack of basic essentials. In April, Brownback signed a bill making it illegal for welfare recipients to withdraw more than $25 from an ATM at one time. Although the policy might violate federal law, state officials have recently expressed steadfast commitment to its implementation and enforcement. The policy manages to achieve the trifecta of mean-spiritedness, dangerous negligence of human needs, and Orwellian intervention into the private lives of citizens from the state.

Failure to make student loan payments in Iowa and Montana will result in delinquent borrowers losing their driver’s licenses. With student loan defaults on the rise, and rates of poverty, even among the college educated, increasing, states are developing punitive measures to damage the lives of those already buried in student debt. Tennessee, for example, will revoke the nursing license of a nurse who fails to make student loan payments. Iowa and Montana are the worst offenders, however. Losing the ability to drive, especially in largely rural states without sophisticated public transit, will reduce the potential for poor people to work, take children to school, and take any step toward escaping poverty.

According to an in-depth, detailed investigation by Human Rights Watch, “Arkansas is the only US state where tenants can end up as convicted criminals because they did not pay their rent on time.” Arkansas has a unique and singularly monstrous “failure to vacate” law. Failure to Vacate allows prosecutors to charge tenants as criminals without any evidence outside the landlord’s testimony. Tenants face fines far exceeding the rent they owe, and in many cases, a sentence of jail time.

The Justice Department did not find cause to prosecute former Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson in the killing of Michael Brown, but it did gather undeniable evidence proving that the poor, and in this case, mostly black residents of Ferguson live under occupation from the Ferguson police force. “Officers routinely conduct stops that have little relation to public safety and a questionable basis in law,” the Department of Justice explained. “Issuing three or four charges in one stop is not uncommon,” according to the report, “Officers sometimes write six, eight, or, in at least one instance, fourteen citations for a single encounter.” In 2012, 19 percent of Ferguson’s budget derived from the imposition of fines and court fees.

After an exhaustive study of legal harassment and predatory targeting of the poor in Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio, Georgia, and Washington, the ACLU concluded “that poor defendants are being jailed at increasingly alarming rates for failing to pay legal debts they can never hope to afford.” The Supreme Court ruled the imprisonment of poor people for failure to pay legal fees unconstitutional, but many states ignore the law with impunity, as their powerless victims have little recourse to challenge their jailers. In Georgia, to cite one egregious example, authorities prosecuted a mentally ill teenager for stealing school supplies. The cost of her incarceration in juvenile detention centers came to a total of $4,000. The teenage girl was released only after her mother was able to pay the bill in full. In the Georgia case, and many others across America, the state functions as hostage taker, demanding family members pay ransom for the release of their loved ones.

Voter Identification requirements in southern states, and elsewhere, make it much more difficult for the poor to exercise their civic right to oppose the very policies, such as those enumerated above, that damage them.

Nearly 9 percent of people with incomes below the poverty line (around $20,000 for a three-person family) said they suffered from “serious psychological distress.” That means that between 2009 and 2013, the years during which the survey was conducted, nearly one out of 10 of these people — and there are more than 40 million of them — felt debilitating levels of anxiety and depression. In contrast, barely more than 1 percent of those whose incomes exceeded the poverty line by four times or more said they felt similar mental anguish.

Imagine making it so that banks can collect extra fees from mothers with small children who are trying to feed them on less than four hundred dollars a month. How cruel do you have to be to think that making them only carry 20 dollars cash will somehow teach them a lesson? But this is what’s happening in states governed by miserly Republicans who are determined to wring every last dime out of people who have nothing and give it to people who have more than they can spend in a lifetime. In Scott Walker’s Wisconsin, for instance, they are making long lists of prohibited foods for those who use SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs.) The list of other prohibited purchases includes “herbs, spices, or seasonings,” all nuts, red and yellow potatoes, smoothies, spaghetti sauce, “soups, salsas, ketchup,” sauerkraut, pickles, dried beans sold in bulk, and white or albacore tuna.

www.salon.com

More than four million people are sentenced to probation in America, according to the report. Because state funding for probation services is on the decline, more private companies are talking over the responsibility of managing them. Private probation companies don’t charge local governments for their services, so there is no fee to the taxpayer. Probationers, however, are charged a supervision fee, and if they can’t afford to pay, they face jail time. Despite the fact that it is unconstitutional to jail people because they can’t pay fines, the reality is that many probationers are poor and unaware of their rights and they end up in modern-day debtors’ prisons.

More than $3 billion in cash and property has been seized by local and state police agencies through a Department of Justice asset seizure program. Eighty percent of the assets collected through this program stay with the law enforcement agencies that collect them, the Washington Post reported. Under asset forfeit seizure programs, cops can take someone’s property simply under “reasonable suspicion” it was used to commit a crime; the burden of proof is on the property owner that the seizure was unjustified.

Black students make up just 16 percent of the population but represent 32-42 percent of students who are suspended or expelled, according to the “The Poor Get Prison” report. Many school districts around the country use local police to provide security, which further increases these students’ chances of arrest.

The New York City Council is considering proposals to make petty crimes like peeing in public and drinking from an open container civil instead of criminal offenses. This follows years of hyper-policing and criminalizing an increasing list of tiny infractions.

If you are homeless in America and have nowhere to go and are down on your luck, it is increasingly difficult to find a safe space in which to exist without being fined for loitering. According to the report, an estimated 600,000 people are homeless on any given night. Though nearly 13 percent of the nation’s low-income housing has been lost since 2001, and many people simply cannot afford housing, 34 percent of cities ban public camping, 18 percent prohibit sleeping in public and 43 percent prevent people from sleeping in vehicles, according to a study the report cited.